Hardwick Vineyard Winery Quabbin Native Red

The name: Quabbin Native Red Wine

The winery: Hardwick Vineyard and Winery, Hardwick, MA.

The grape: Pink Catawba

Price: $14.99

Unfortunately for a first go, this is one of the worst wines I've ever tasted. I'm actually feeling sick to my stomach as I write this. The problems start very quickly for this wine. In a dim liquor store or even a wine cabinet with the light off it looks to be a light red, like a rose, but in better light it's true color is revealed: orange.

It's not even a particularly nice orange, either. It has the same color as orange scented dish soap or whatever that medicine with the little plastic cup children are given is. The packaging is bad as well -- getting the cork out broke my corkscrew. When the cork is finally out, things only go downhill.

The scent hits you in much the same way as a total stranger suddenly sucker punching you in the grocery store and it smells like a dry erase marker, only it doesn't make you dizzy. That's a pity, as it means you're still compos mentis when you taste it and thus can't claim that you did it because you were off your head. No, like mortal sin this wine requires full consent of the will.

One word describes the taste: tart. In more than one word: flat cherry limeade. It's so sweet I have a hard time believing it was fermented out of actual grapes in a real vinyard rather than out of powdered sugary drink in a prison toilet. There are no complex flavors, it doesn't develop on the tongue, it has none of the subtelty of a good dessert wine. It's like modern art -- it hits you over the head to say nothing at all.

Verdict: Vile. It's cheaper to sniff a marker and suck on a lemon.

Introduction

Having spent the last several months and even years reading articles about localism and food by the likes of Rod Dreher and Gracy Olmstead, plus watching Anthony Bourdain on television do much the same thing and hearing from all sorts of people about buying local, I decided that this summer I would begin to engage with the local wine scene.

New England is not the center of American wine. It's on the opposite coast from it, in fact, and our climate doesn't really conform to any of the other great wine-growing regions of the world. But grapes do grow here. We have an island called Martha's Vinyard, after all. Loony racist millionaire Eben Horsford believed that, because of the grapes, New England was the Vinland of the Viking sagas. He believed that Leif Eriksson founded a city called Norumbega on the Charles, since that would mean that blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordics reached America before swarthy Catholic Italians and Spaniards.

But when life gives you grapes, you might as well make wine. Dozens of vinyards have popped up in recent years, thanks to declining returns on traditional agricultural products and the success of the craft beer industry.

And, since I like wine, I thought it might be worthwhile to taste them.

(Also, I was sick of my roommates mocking me for drinking cheap wines like Charles "Two-buck Chuck" Shaw and Carlo Rossi.)

May God have mercy on my soul (and liver).